Joe Dibuduo - Author

View in the browser Share on Twitter Share on Facebook 10.02 The Download Good morning! Here are today’s most important stories in emerging technology. We can print untraceable guns. Should we? Overnight, a Las Vegas shooting killed 50 people and wounded 200, making it the deadliest shooting in modern U.S. history, according to Bloomberg. In...

The Free Speech Movement was launched in Berkeley, California, on this date in 1964 . It was the first mass civil disobedience protest held on a college campus during the 1960s. The University of California at Berkeley had a policy against allowing political activity or fundraising on campus, with the exception of the established Democrat and Republican student...

Monsanto’s poison of mass destruction DA Dalia Hashad – Avaaz Monsanto is pushing a super poison that flies through the air killing plants in its path…except for Monsanto GMOs. But in days a US state could ban it, setting a precedent for the world. If one million of us sign this petition now, we’ll submit it to the official process to...

Beer Beer, give me a beer that’ll disappear my fears. Not just any beer. Give me one brewed with 9% alcohol or more. Make it dark and bitter if you will. Frost my glass and fill it with dark, dark brew that’ll go down my chute to satisfy that urge for a...

It’s the birthday of “Blind” Lemon Jefferson , born on a farm in Coutchman, Texas, in about 1893. Jefferson began playing picnics and parties in the region, and eventually he made his way to Dallas. He performed every day on the corner of Central and Elm, near a train stop where the black workers would get off at...

Don’t mess with ATHENA. That’s the Advanced Test High Energy Asset to you and me, and it’s Lockheed’s astonishingly destructive laser cannon. It’s been developing the weapon in order to take down drones without messy—and position-revealing—recourse to anything as crass as bullets. By focusing a high-intensity 30-kilowatt laser beam at the airframe of a drone, Lockheed...

It’s the birthday of famed horror writer Stephen King (books by this author), born in Portland, Maine (1947). King is most known for his supernatural novels like Carrie, The Shining, and PetSematary . His books have sold more than 350 million copies worldwide. King often laments the fact that the genre of horror is maligned...

You’re made of water, bone, blood, muscle, and fat; you’re also a few parts plastic. That is, if you prefer sea salt on your meal. Or honey, shellfish, beer or tap water. Recent studies have found microplastics, tiny shards of degraded plastic, in them all. Even the air is filled with the minuscule plastic bits....

It was on this day in 1814that Francis Scott Key was inspired to write the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” by witnessing the British attack on Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor. It had been a dark summer for the young United States. Just three weeks previous, on August 24, British troops had set fire to much of Washington,...

PISA, Italy (Reuters) – YuMi the humanoid robot showed no signs of nerves on Tuesday night as it raised its baton to conduct the Lucca Philharmonic orchestra alongside Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli. The two-armed robot, designed by Swiss firm ABB, made its debut at Pisa’s Verdi Theatre to mark the First International Festival of Robotics...

Forty-eight years ago today, in 1969, the Official Languages Act came into force in Canada, making French equal to English throughout the Federal government. The act was introduced by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal government and was intended to promote national unity and improve relations between Canada’s English-speaking population and the French Canadians of Quebec. In 1971,...

On this day in 1963, more than 200,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C., for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, now known as the March on Washington . The march was the brainchild of civil rights activists A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, who once said, “We need, in every community, a group of angelic...

It was a strange moment of triumph against racism: The gun-slinging white supremacist Craig Cobb, dressed up for daytime TV in a dark suit and red tie, hearing that his DNA testing revealed his ancestry to be only “86 percent European, and … 14 percent Sub-Saharan African.” The studio audience whooped and laughed and cheered....

Bborn in Andernach, Germany (1920). He wrote more than 45 books of poetry and prose, including It Catches My Heart in Its Hands (1963), Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969), Post Office (1971), Love Is a Dog from Hell (1977), Ham on Rye (1982), and The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992). His American father had been stationed in Germany during World War I,...

“Take this pill,” the medicine man said when the moon was overhead, “Strike me dead if it doesn’t make you young and full of pep again.” I believed his words because; diplomas hanging on his walls put me in awe of how accomplished he was, so I took the pills to be young again....

Physicists began speculating in the late 19th century that there may exist particles and matter that are exact opposites of the matter that surrounds us, mirror-image anti-atoms and perhaps even whole anti-solar systems where matter and antimatter might meet and annihilate one another. But on this day in 1932, American physicist Carl Anderson discovered the first physical evidence that antimatterwas...

Today is the birthday of the woman Teddy Roosevelt once called “the most dangerous woman in America” when she was 87 years old. Mary Harris Jones, or “Mother Jones” (books by this author), was born to a tenant farmer in Cork, Ireland, in 1837. Her family fled the potato famine when she was just 10, resettling in Toronto....